How Jesus used evidence to gain followers
Christianity is not a scientific religion in the sense that it is not possible to conduct repeated experiments in order to verify its…
Christianity is not a scientific religion in the sense that it is not possible to conduct repeated experiments in order to verify its claims, but it has never denied the importance of evidence in proclaiming the Gospel.
Jesus, according to the Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, John as well as the writings of Paul and others lays out the central tenets of the faith, known as The Way:
Jesus is the promised Messiah or Christ spoken of in the Old Testament.
Jesus has been given authority over all things including the forgiveness of sins.
Following Jesus is the only pathway to eternal life (literally life unto the age) through the forgiveness of sins and reconciling to God.
This eternal life will be achieved by a physical resurrection of the body.
In order to follow Jesus, one must receive the Spirit and obey his commands (love God and one another, forgive others, the 10 commandments, and so on).
These are not claims but promises. Jesus wanted people to accept his promises in any way they could.
In order to convince others to trust in Him and the One who sent him, he did many miracles. Jesus said this in John 10:37-8,
If I do not perform the deeds of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe me, believe the deeds, so that you may come to know and understand that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.
Jesus was well aware that actions speak louder than words which is why he performed his miracles, not in secret, telling others about them later as founders of other religions do, but in front of everyone.
Witness of the Apostles
The word Apostle, which he gave to some of his followers, means “one who is sent” — an ambassador or envoy to proclaim the Gospel to others. Nearly all the Apostles and many other disciples became martyrs. They were killed for not only believing but proclaiming their beliefs in defiance of the authorities of the time. Martyr means “Witness”. Hence, Jesus sent his followers to be envoys and witnesses to the truth.
How do we know that the Apostles’ were martyred and didn’t just vanish, having promoted a lie? We have good evidence for Peter’s martyrdom from Jesus’s prophecy of it in John as well as from early Church fathers. We are also told that James, Son of Zebedee, was executed (Acts 12:2). James, the brother of Jesus, was executed for his faith as well as told by Josephus, a non-Christian source.
If you deny the Gospel, you have to answer this question: Why would these people voluntarily suffer persecution and die for a lie? Would anyone? Yet, they were witnesses to the ministry of Jesus. They believed in what they saw when Jesus returned after his resurrection.
Of course, there have been many martyrs to lies in other religions as well as political struggles, but those who had a choice to live or die chose to die because they believed in what they were dying for. The Apostles saw everything that happened right from the beginning when Jesus called them, yet chose to face persecution.
So either Jesus was a master charlatan who convinced the Apostles even after he was crucified, an event they also witnessed firsthand, that he was alive, or the Apostles were all charlatans who invented the resurrection to gain power and melted away when the persecution got out of hand with, perhaps, a few getting caught up in it by accident.
This latter explanation is what is written about at the end of Matthew, the so-called “Stolen Body Hypothesis” for the empty tomb. If this is true, though, you’d expect the accounts of the resurrection to be more consistent with one another as a careful fabrication tries to avoid inconsistency while the truth is often messy. You’d also have to ask what motive they might have had. You have to look at this through the lens of what Jews in 1st century Palestine believed, not what Christians later came to believe. They didn’t expect his immediate resurrection. They expected him to re-establish the kingdom of Israel, which he did not do. There was no reason to pretend he had been resurrected even if somebody else stole the body since nobody at that time believed resurrection would happen before the end of the world. It was completely unexpected.
The final explanation is that Jesus really did come back from the dead.
Science and Resurrection
It is of course possible to invent elaborate conspiracy theories to try to explain everything, but the motivation to believe these instead of the accounts as they are presented is that it conflicts with our preconceived notions.
To the 1st century Jews, that meant their traditional understanding of scripture and the role of the Messiah, that he would overthrow the Roman oppressors and establish an earthly kingdom in the line of David. To we 21st century Westerners, it challenges our understanding of scientific fact, which is the lens through which we view history.
There is an apparent conflict between science and the testimony of the Apostles and martyrs because what they claimed happened has never been demonstrated to be scientifically possible. People don’t have the power to miraculously heal others without advanced technology that didn’t exist in the 1st century, and people don’t come back from the dead.
The problem is that the resurrection of Jesus is a single historical event to which we have no comparison in history. It is something like the Big Bang, the hot dense phase that preceded the coming into being of the Universe. We may understand a great deal about all the things that happened just after the Big Bang but going back we come to a point where we cannot understand it. We don’t have the physical models to explain how it came into being nor can we repeat it in a lab.
The same is true with the ministry of Jesus. It is a single historical period and we don’t have physical models to explain how Jesus was able to be resurrected because, like the Big Bang, it has only happened once.
Also like the Big Bang, however, we can look at the history of what occurred just after the ministry of Jesus to infer that at least the most important aspects of it happened the way the Gospel tells us it did.
For example, just after Jesus’s crucifixion, on that terrible Passover, the disciples had no expectation that Jesus would rise from the dead the next day. Even though he told them repeatedly during his ministry that he would rise on the third day, they assumed this to be a spiritual ascent to heaven, not a literal resurrection. They just didn’t believe it any more than a modern scientist would. After all, many “Messiahs” had come and gone before Jesus and all of them were killed, their followers dispersed. None had come back.
Yet, having seen him, they all believed enough to initiate the church. Something huge changed.
Going back to our analogy: we infer the Big Bang happened from evidence including the bright background radiation that occurred 300,000 years after it happened, the Cosmic Microwave Background, the fact that all galaxies are moving apart from one another, suggesting they were basically on top of each other at some point in the past, and also the proportions of light elements that exist in the universe, which is consistent with the Big Bang having happened. Now, we can’t explain everything we observe. That is why we need Dark Matter and Dark Energy to explain exactly how the universe looks today, but without the Big Bang we would have to bend over backwards theorizing an alternative. Some scientists do, but most accept the explanation, despite the fact that they cannot do repeated experiments to explain it.
The bottom line is: If we remove the fact of Jesus’s resurrection from history, as with the Big Bang, we still have to infer that it happened, just from the aftermath.
The book of Acts 5:34–9 shows that at least one member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling assembly, believed in exactly this theory,
But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men [Apostles] be put outside for a little while. 35 Then he addressed the Sanhedrin: “Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. 36 Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. 37 After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. 38 Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. 39 But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.
If you take Gamaliel’s statement in consideration that this movement did not die out but flourished and conquered an empire, lasting till the present day, that implies that not only was the resurrection true but that the purpose of the Apostles was itself from God.
You could say that Jesus’ followers were just an exception. They were the ones that worked. They won the proverbial lottery and kept going. But then you are forced to believe that they did so knowing that everything they were preaching was a lie or they were the victims of an elaborate conspiracy. It doesn’t work.
Neither does it work to say that the Gospels and the Apostles’ martyrdom were themselves a fabrication of later Christians. For one thing, the books of the New Testament are too detailed and written in a style that implied they were eyewitness accounts (possibly passed down orally at first).
The Gospel authors do not present their texts as having been handed down by an angel or God Himself as other religions do with their holy books. They don’t even claim that Jesus dictated them. They are written as eyewitness accounts of things that actually happened.
The Gospels present themselves humbly as the accounts of mere mortals. In the case of Luke, the author, in his preface, even suggests that “those who [were] eyewitnesses and servants of the word” had passed on a “number of accounts” (Luke 1:2). His goal was not to create an eyewitness account but an “orderly account” (suggesting that what existed at the time may have been disorderly). He did not lie and say that he received his account directly from Jesus or that he was an eyewitness himself.
The witnesses to the events of Christ’s ministry and especially his resurrection are often not the best witnesses a human might ask for. In particular, the first witnesses to the resurrected Jesus seem to be women (or even one woman, Mary Magdalen) who would not have been allowed to give testimony in a court of law at the time.
If you were going to invent a religion, would you write it this way? Would you have ordinary mortals present your most important events as things they saw or would you have an angel hand it down from on High? The only book of the New Testament presented this way is Revelation, which is about the future so cannot be events that many people witness.
It is unlikely that 1st or 2nd century Christians would invent all this. Indeed, early Christianity is full of attempts to invent religions out of the kernel of Christian eyewitness. Heretical branches like Docetism, one of the various forms of Gnosticism, for example, tried to reinvent Jesus as a non-corporeal being. Marcionism rejected the Old Testament.
Four records of the core events of Jesus’s life, ministry, and resurrection have survived intact despite these and many other attempts to add to them. Few historical events in the ancient world have two accounts let alone four.
If, therefore, we infer this event based on its aftermath, we have two choices: we can approach it without preconceptions and ask how it could be otherwise from the accounts or we can keep our minds closed and assume that the accounts must be false and try to come up with some explanation as to why. If we choose the latter path, we will invariably come up with something that satisfies all the evidence, but does it satisfy us to cling to preconceived notions or is it better to keep an open mind?
I for one live in a world where evidence is critical to everything I do. I do not make decisions based on what I would like to be true or what I have been told without evidence. Yet, every decision has to be made with an open mind and asking “what if?” because, if I refuse to entertain the improbable, I will never achieve it.
The same is true of the story of the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Resurrection is improbable but not scientifically impossible. To achieve it oneself requires taking a leap of faith, but that faith is not devoid of evidence nor did Jesus command us to suspend our intellects in order to trust in his Word. If we are not willing to trust his Word alone, he meets us halfway by presenting witnesses willing to die to carry that word to those who will believe it.